Other people’s words about … cages

At not yet thirty, she can feel her life shrinking into the gentle sameness of her days and she knows she is pacing back and forth in a comfortable cage of her own construction. She needs someone to bump against, to disrupt things. she can’t go on like this, she knows. She must resolve the tension between longing and fear.

From ‘The Fragments‘by Toni Jordan

I’m back! I’ve missed blogging. I’ve missed you all, too.

And I’ve gone on collecting other people’s words, gone on taking photographs of the world around me, gone on wanting to have a place to keep the words I’ve collected and the pictures I’ve taken. So I’ve decided, rather than ending this blog completely, as I first planned to do, to pop in every now and then with a quote I love or a photograph I’ve taken. I’d like to keep the practice up, and I hope that some of you will continue to enjoy reading the words I’ve found, or seeing the photographs I’ve taken, as you might have done in the past.

Last year, as some of you may remember, I lost my job. In the end, instead of looking for a new job straight away, I decided I would take a few weeks or months off first. And so that’s what I’ve been doing in the weeks since I last wrote: living on my savings and trying out, meantime, new habits, new practices. I’m trying to disrupt some of my old ways, like Caddie in the passage I’ve quoted above; I’m trying to stop pacing back and forth in a comfortable cage of [my] own construction; I’m trying to let my life expand, rather than to shrink. There’s no time like now!

Because there is always a way through … always

Thank you for accompanying me so far on my blogging journey. Thank you, too, to the readers who wrote to me and encouraged me to keep posting, if only sporadically: who told me I was missed. I hope you all find pleasure in the posts that are still to come.

It was the week of daffodils, and they were everywhere — outside everyone’s fences and shrubs, jubilant. It was that perfect running weather: cool and damp, still a little cloudy over the water.

From ‘Alternative Remedies for Loss’ by Joanna Cantor

The photos in today’s post come from a run I went on in early October, a muggy, warm, cloudy spring day, perfect for running, though different from the conditions Cantor describes above.

It was also the Monday of the October long weekend, as well as the first weekend of the school holidays, so the jetties at Semaphore and Largs Bay were jostling with people, and kids paddled and squealed in the water. Dogs dashed about on the shore, chasing balls.

This year, oddly, the usual swathes of variable groundsel flowers didn’t appear on the dunes around Taperoo and Largs Bay, though they did dot the dunes at Aldinga, further south. But the pigface plants blossomed as usual, their astonishing purple brightness undimmed by the cloudy sky above.

On the way home, I left the beach by a path I don’t usually take, and found this array of beach-thongs dotting the fence post, which brought a smile to my face:

Whatever your definition of perfect running weather, I’m pretty certain that any day on which you finish up your run with a smile comes close to perfect, regardless!

But a certain dullness of mind seems an almost necessary qualification, if not for every public man, at least for everyone seriously engaged in making money.

From ‘The Idiot’by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Hmmm … read and weep. Dostoevsky’s observation about people is as relevant now as it was when he wrote it in the late nineteenth century. If only our public figures, our business people, our politicians would take heed!

But onto other things — no more weeping for now. One of the overarching reasons I’ve had for writing this blog in the last few years has been to give myself (and hopefully you, my readers) the chance to explore the joys of reading: to revel in other people’s words, to find meaning in their thoughts and the way they express them, to learn from them, to find communion and kinship with them. As I’ve remarked before, without books and reading, I would be a far lonelier person.

Recently, I’ve found a different kind of companionship in my reading. On Mother’s Day earlier this year, my mother and I started a reading ‘project’ together, our own little two-woman book club. At her suggestion, we have decided to read works of translation. We take it in turns to pick a title and read it, and then we exchange titles, and, having read them, meet up for coffee or for a walk to talk about them. The Idiot was one of her choices.

My mother is an inveterate reader. She reads widely, hungrily, curiously. Her joy in reading is contagious and almost palpable. I’m glad — and privileged — to have ‘caught’ that joy from her. And I’m extra glad to be exploring new books with her, to be having my world opened by her and by the writers she chooses.

Meanwhile, while we’re on the subject of translation, here’s the thing about reading, and the happiness you can find in it: it translates into life.

Other people’s words about … the sea

He opened the window and let in the ocean, gulped in that grey air as though oxygen was enough to save him from the people in the house, watched the waves, noted the dark rip forming at the southern end of the beach. He ignored the sound of Charlie’s voice in the lounge, hilarious, oblivious, the sounds of the girl in the bathroom behind him, scrubbing insistently; called to mind the tentacles of the cloud from earlier, saw the colours he’d mix [if he were to paint it], the strokes, the shapes. After a few moments, his breathing slowed and he began to enter the place where no one else could come.

From ‘Bluebottle‘by Belinda Castles

Like Jack in the quote above, sometimes I find that the best cure, the only cure, for my day’s woes is a few deep breaths of fresh ocean air. That’s why I live so close to the sea, just a few minutes’ walk away.

The kind of seaside scene Castles describes in the passage above isn’t your stereotypical calm blue seas and white sands and warm, soft air. No, it’s a grey day, a wild day, an ominous day, heralding the end of summer. And yet it save[s] Jack, all the same.

When I took the beachside photos you see in this post, just a few weeks ago, the air was grey, just as it is for Jack as he looks out of his bedroom window onto the beach scene below. But in my case, the greyness came from a winter fog rather than a summer storm. This was a thick, dank, spectral fog that hung over the ocean for half an hour or so and then drifted away again.

And, like Jack, I gulped in that grey air and let the rest of my day fade away — and felt all the better for it.

If I am thinking at all when I run, this is a sign of a run gone wrong — or, at least, of a run that has not yet gone right. The run does not yet have me in its grip. I am not yet in the heartbeat of the run; the rhythm of the run has not done its hypnotic work. On every long run that has gone right, there comes a point where thinking stops and thoughts begin.

From ‘Running with the Pack:
Thoughts from the Road on Meaning & Mortality’ by Mark Rowlands

I suspect — no, in fact, I know — that I don’t run far enough, or long enough, or hard enough to have experienced the same kind of long run to which Mark Rowlands is referring here. And yet, even on my kind of run — the kind of run when you run simply for the joy of the moment and nothing else — there comes a point when the rhythm of the run [begins to do] its hypnotic work for me.

That’s why I came back to running, twenty years after I stopped. I am a worrier, a thinker — no, an over-thinker. But I’m not when I run. For those twenty years when I stopped running, I couldn’t forget the sweet spot I used to find at some point during a run, when, as Rowland puts it, thinking stops and thoughts begin. And I couldn’t find it, either — not outside of running.

Elsewhere in his book, Rowlands has this to say about why he runs:

People sometimes assess the quality of their runs in terms of times, distances and also in more sophisticated ways: the AIs — the number, duration and intensity of the aerobic intervals they have inserted into the miles they have run; the TUT — the total uphill time and so on. But, as far as I am concerned, times, distances, AIs, TUTs — these are all just contingencies, incidentals. Every run has its own heartbeat; the years have taught me this. The heartbeat of the run is the essence of the run, what the run really is.

I’m with Rowlands here. I don’t do tech — either in my day-to-day life or while I’m out running. I don’t own a smartphone, or a fitbit, or a garmin. I don’t even own a pedometer. The only things I take with me when I go for a run are my (non-digital) watch and (sometimes, but not always) my camera. That’s it. I put my watch on my wrist, and I hold my camera in one hand, and then I go out and run. I know roughly how far I run, but only roughly, which is exactly how I like it.

Every run has its own heartbeat, Rowlands says, and then, without skipping a beat: the years have taught me this. Those words — heartbeat, the years, taught — have nothing to do with AIs or TUTs (neither of which I’d heard of, before I read Rowlands’s book), and everything to do with living. With learning. With growing.

Which are some of the other reasons that I run.

I took the photos you see in today’s post on a run one Sunday morning in late August. I ran northwards from home, in the opposite direction to the jetty that you will have seen pictured on other posts in my blog: beyond the breakwater and along the water’s edge by the yacht club and marina. As you can see, there was virtually no wind, though the air was brisk and cold.

It was a blue day — blue sky, blue water, blue paint on the boat ramps. Blue. Blue. Blue. My eyes felt wide open to the blue. I had promised myself that I would stop whenever I wanted to, whenever I saw something that struck my fancy, and that is what I did: I ran and stopped, ran and stopped, ran and stopped. I ran into the blue. I lost my rhythm and then found it again, several times, and it took me a while to figure out that this was my rhythm, on that morning, at least.

And I felt, as I often do when I’m out running, that I had found my heartbeat again: that I had heard it, and understood it, and honoured it.